Fantasy Flight’s CALL OF CTHULHU collectible card game was pretty good. It was definitely better than most non-MAGIC: THE GATHERING CCGs. It was a better design than expected and it was the best Cthulhu Mythos-themed gamed on the market at the time. Remember, this was before ARKHAM HORROR was reprinted and revised by Fantasy Flight so gamers looking for Lovecraftian kicks could either go the RPG route with CALL OF CTHULHU (the best role playing game ever published, by the way) or slum with poor games like the sanity-draining sludge that was CULTS ACROSS AMERICA. Back when Atlanta Game Factory first opened the CALL OF CTHULHU CCG was one of the biggest sellers we had on the shelves- largely because I got interested in playing it and our earliest regulars bought into the game with the assurance that there would always be someone there in the store (me) that would play with them.

The game allowed players to select from a variety of factions and organizations pulled from the Mythos- the usual monsters, minions and followers of the Great Old Ones were present but gangsters, amateur occultists, cops, archaeologists and others tagged along for the ride. The point was to win story cards, essentially three on the table “regions” where players would deploy their various agents and assets in order to win several struggles. The game was really a sort of majority/area control thing- numbers of trait icons are compared, better numbers carry the day (or night, as the case may be).

When players squared off over a story card, a Terror struggle determined who, if anyone, ran away before anything else happened. Then, combat icons and bonuses are totaled and resolved to figure out who got hurt in the ensuing hostilities. Winning the Arcane struggle phase meant you could untap one of your agents so that you could use him/her/it to defend when the other player retaliated. Once all that was over with, the side with the highest remaining score got to put an investigation token on the story card to indicate success. And then, skill numbers were compared to determine if another investigation token could be placed. Put five on there and you’ve won the storyline.

The goal of the game was to win three of these story cards and as each was won you could either enact or choose to not enact a special effect generated by the storyline. Sometimes they would do very nasty things or very helpful things. In retrospect, the game doesn’t sound all that great and could, in fact, be interpreted as a mathematical exercise that would probably appeal to bean-counting Eurogamers.

However, the game felt like more than that and had a lot of flavor. The struggles over stories could be intense and simply trying to block your opponent from taking a particularly damaging action would often lend a sense of urgency to the game. The usual CCG impetus to identify synergetic combinations of cards was there. Marshalling your resources- of which there were never enough- and picking the right fights was critical. It felt right for a CALL OF CTHULHU game and the gameplay was fairly unique for a CCG. Top it off with an interesting resource scheme wherein players were forced to choose cards to be placed under “domains”, essentially resource pools, in order to pay for everything and you’ve got a tight, interesting little game with a lot of tough choices and some very fun gameplay.

But CALL OF CTHULHU eventually petered out. The AGF crowd moved on to other interests, eventually tiring of the money-sink, echoing a larger disinterest in the game. I sold my sets on eBay and the game sort of slipped away outside of the diehard fans. It was discontinued after a couple of expansion sets despite organized play offered by FFG and a pretty decent fanbase. Now, here it is five years after the game’s initial release, and FFG is giving the game a new lease on un-life as part of their new “Living Card Game” initiative which also includes a revision of their popular GAME OF THRONES card game. The LCG idea is that a core set of cards- essentially a complete game for two players- is released and then supported by small expansion packs with fixed sets of cards. No random purchases, no boosters, no money sink—at least not in the same way as the classic “starters and boosters” distribution model.

The new CALL OF CTHULHU LCG is an attractive package overall. Not only do you get a completely non-random core set of 165 cards from the base game and its expansions, but you also get a small game board to hold the story cards and counters to track investigation progress. You also get six shockingly large, plastic Cthulhu miniatures sculpted straight from the description of the statue from the Lovecraft story.

Within this set, players can combine the various factions and organizations involved in the arcane struggle that the game depicts in over twenty different configurations so essentially the deck building is there, it’s just controlled so that you simply select two factions and use all of their cards plus a supplement of “neutral” assets to make sure there’s enough shotguns, swords, copies of the Necronomicon, and paddy wagons to go around. There’s a basic set of story cards included so what you get feels comprehensive, complete and will probably satisfy most gamers without any further purchases required to play or enjoy the game. There’s plenty enough variety in the box to last for a long time, and with 10 “Asylum” packs of forty non-random cards to supplement the core game already being released, there’s lots more to explore if players want to take their interest in the game further.